biography

Jaap Borgers (Netherlands 1947) was educated in the 60’s
and 70’s as a painter, sculptor and glasblower at the Art Academy in
Utrecht and the Rietveld
Academy in Amsterdam, with gueststudies in Denmark and England. He has
had
exhibitions with a variety of works in Holland, France, Germany and
Finland.
Originally his work was based on traditional Dutch neo-realism and
craftmanship.

During
his studies at the Rietveld he specialised in making portraits, built a
bronze-foundry and made his own tools for carving wood and stone. He
was an apprentice
at a restoration
studio and restored woodcarvings in the parliamentbuildings in The
Hague.
He also assisted stonecarvers and an ornamental smith. His free
sculptural work was
mainly abstract, but later it became realistic and more related to
his former paintings.
Lately his work has become more conceptual.

Besides his work as an artist he has been involved with teaching
portraitmodelling, managing a cultural centre, doing theatre-lighting
and set up a
theatre. He organizes for over fifteen years now the art-manifestation
SchoK in wich yearly over
a hundred professional artists of all disciplines participate. Here he
also has a
platform to make installations/performances in coöperation with other
artists.

After Borgers met his wife, Finnish ceramist Pike Räsänen, he lived and
worked partly in Finland for over ten years. Here he got in touch with
the Japanese
firing method ‘Raku’. This finally resulted in sculptures
constructed with
thin Raku fired clay-slabs. In these Raku-works he integrates imprints
of -previously made-
portraits, of which a fleeting image stays behind.

At the moment he combines this way of working in clay, with parts of
old, rusty iron. He also combines drawings with partly deteriorated
materials and makes installations. He has exhibited in various Europian
countries and is active as a boardmember for several intenational
artist organisations.